Consider that Hindi is essentially a vulgar melting-pot language common to an area whose formal languages are Sanskrit and Pali. Latin and Greek share much in common with Sanskrit, and Italian is just lazy Latin, so there's your connection. Try checking a Hindi dictionary and you'll be amazed to see all the cognates.

But they call Telugu the 'Italian of teh East' because of its (superficial) phonetic resemblance to the same.

Having done Latin at school, it used to amaze me that anyone could actually speak it on the fly, as it were; all the different declensions and conjugations add up to a considerable amount of mental work needed to even write a sentence of Latin, never mind speak it.

Maybe that's how the Roman Empire grew so big, all that mental exercise, but then it declined so perhaps they got lazy....

I am not sure, and I think nobody does, how the latin was spoken. The latin we know is written by intellectuals. The poetics forms needs an effort from the reader, I dont think was truly understood "on the fly". I guess the vulgar latin was a simplified version of the one we know.

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"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."Jorge Luis Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise. --Jumalauta!!

Consider that Hindi is essentially a vulgar melting-pot language common to an area whose formal languages are Sanskrit and Pali. Latin and Greek share much in common with Sanskrit, and Italian is just lazy Latin, so there's your connection. Try checking a Hindi dictionary and you'll be amazed to see all the cognates.

But they call Telugu the 'Italian of teh East' because of its (superficial) phonetic resemblance to the same.

Having done Latin at school, it used to amaze me that anyone could actually speak iton the fly, as it were; all the different declensions ans conjugations add up to a considerable amount of mental work needed to even write a sentence of Latin, never mind speak it.

Maybe that's how the Roman Empire grew so big, all that mental exercise, but then it declined so perhaps they got lazy....

I don't think it's that. The strict and complex grammar Old English deteriorated in similar circumstances, but only relatively small kingdoms existed in England. Many things caused the demise of the Roman Empire though.

In the military aspect, other Europeans and Hebrews began to take advantage of the Legion's stale tactics. Though able to hold territory, newer techniques such as Visigoth heavy cavalry and Jewish guerrilla warfare inflicted unsustainable damage. The Roman military were eventually forced to dispatch essential duties to a bunch of bored Saxon conscripts with beer bellies, who couldn't care less about what they did anyway. The spatha--made for defense, rather than the Spanish sword--made for killing, soon came to represent the weakened state of the Roman military.

There's more than that of course. The spread of Christianity certainly played a significant role in diverting the loyalty of many citizens from the Empire. Almost no production of material goods and lack of a middle class, among other factors, ruined the economy. Arguably even the lead plumbing and food seasoning (lead acetate) were responsible somehow; look at how bollixed up Caligula was.

To add something to hanimizzle great post, the empire got too big... There was no way to hold it.Some Imperators saw this, like Adriano, who builded the famous wall and put limits to the expansion; against the tradition of an "empire with no limits".

To add something to hanimizzle great post, the empire got too big... There was no way to hold it.Some Imperators saw this, like Adriano, who builded the famous wall and put limits to the expansion; against the tradition of an "empire with no limits".

(Ironically, Hadrian was from Spain.)

It's just as well that he built his famous wall. The fens and hills of the British Isles, and the fierce Celts who lived in them, turned out to be a nightmare for the Romans, and they couldn't rout the natives as long as they didn't face them on the open field, fighting for personal honor in a very disorganized way.

All told, Hadrian had a good legacy, but cracks in the facade showed by then. Remember that the Romans were also nearly pwned in the Second Jewish-Roman War under his rule, but for the fatal arrogance of the leader of the uprising, a strange Samson/Ho Chi Minh combination named Shimon Bar Kochba. He and his followers uniquely waged war through a system of passages carved in the sturdy limestone of the Holy Land, to their great benefit.

If he were able to control his hair-trigger temper, some say the Romans almost certainly would have lost.

If he were able to control his hair-trigger temper, some say the Romans almost certainly would have lost.

The classic topic, reason vs. passion got many chapters on hystory.

I like Hadrian, he was some kind of exentric imperator. The latins called him "graeculum", the little greek, not in a good way.Of course, I like more the Island people, and those beyond the Rhin River, than the big empire .

Logged

"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."Jorge Luis Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise. --Jumalauta!!

Was true, and, in a sense, is true. Portuguese for example, descends from a dialect of vulgar Latin.

English is much the same. Only in English do the words 'tintinnabulation' and 'bog' coexist, owing to years of migration, growth and often upheaval. It's now somewhat hard to believe that we once used words like 'gamol' and 'niman' and 'mearh', but here it is: